The feeling that death is on the whole a bad thing is so common to the human race that it forms one of the major topics for most religions to explain and cope with. I take this to be e evidence that we were not in fact created for death. Others will have other explanations.
We were created by an evolutionary process driven by, and in an environment containing, death. Life itself is driven by death. Because of death it must reproduce so its genes have a chance of cheating death. In the sense that evolution creates anything for anything, we were created for death.
As humans we object to death because we don't want to die and cease to exist as individuals. Evolutionarily, an organism that doesn't try to stay alive doesn't reproduce. We don't like pain because it hurts; we don't like death because it stops us from reproducing, or indeed helping our children reproduce successfully (what you might call the menopause hypothesis - we evolved this extra stage of life beyond our own reproduction so we could help our genes continue into and through our grandchildren.)
There's an emerging cosmology that proposes that the entirety of our known universe may be housed within an unimaginably large black hole. Considering the size and scale of what we can and do know about some of the contents of our universe, that's astonishing, to say the very least. These musings arise from unexpected images and data coming to us from the James Webb Space Telescope. Time will tell.
I sympathize with you, @KarlLB. I too wrestle with these questions. Also the questions of Omnipotence and Omniscience, both of which have been detailed on these boards many times.
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
Atheism is not a worldview. It's an inability to buy into a worldview. That doesn't mean atheism flatly rejects the numinous, for lack of a better term. It just doesn't park it at the feet of God. Time to resurrect (see what I did there) one of my favorite jokes:
Q: Where was God before he created Heaven and Earth?
A: He was busy making Hell for those who would ask such questions.
I think Russell is generally gloomy. I don't think that the reality of the destination of the species means that human experiences don't matter. We live our lives in community and the philosophical choices we make matters to us, not the reality of the destination of the species in geological time.
Heroism is a real thing. Despair is a choice, in this context.
Very good.
Based on subsequent writings I’m inclined to believe that Russell was overstating his own case for effect.
Whatever logical analysis underpins our beliefs, most people do believe in meaningful choices in their lives. There is certainly life before death regardless of what we may believe about life after death.
It’s one of favourite oft-repeated quote on these discussion forums. “It is a privilege to live this day and the next.”
How we make best use of that privilege is a central question to which we must find meaningful answers.
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
Actions speak louder than words. Genesis 3, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, the conquest of Canaan, that business with Achan and then that business with Uzzah, David's baby son, Ananias and Zaphira - the list goes on and that's a top of my head list of God being unmerciful.
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
Actions speak louder than words. Genesis 3, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, the conquest of Canaan, that business with Achan and then that business with Uzzah, David's baby son, Ananias and Zaphira - the list goes on and that's a top of my head list of God being unmerciful.
I’m not saying at all that there aren’t a lot texts that have to be wrestled with.
But just as you might say it’s error to take what I quoted at face value and ignore the instances you cited, I’d say it’s equally erroneous to take the instances you cited at face value and ignore the many, many times in Scripture that God is described as compassionate, loving and faithful.
The comforting texts and the disturbing texts both have to be held, worked through and wrestled with. And yes, that may be a lifetime of wrestling.
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
Actions speak louder than words. Genesis 3, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, the conquest of Canaan, that business with Achan and then that business with Uzzah, David's baby son, Ananias and Zaphira - the list goes on and that's a top of my head list of God being unmerciful.
I’m not saying at all that there aren’t a lot texts that have to be wrestled with.
But just as you might say it’s error to take what I quoted at face value and ignore the instances you cited, I’d say it’s equally erroneous to take the instances you cited at face value and ignore the many, many times in Scripture that God is described as compassionate, loving and faithful.
The comforting texts and the disturbing texts both have to be held, worked through and wrestled with. And yes, that may be a lifetime of wrestling.
My problem is the comfortable texts seem to be words while the difficult ones are actions - and as I said, actions speak louder. If someone's punching me in the face while telling me they love me I'm not going to believe them.
Put it another way, I don't give a wet fish how many times God is described in positive terms. I care about what he's recorded to have actually done
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
Actions speak louder than words. Genesis 3, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, the conquest of Canaan, that business with Achan and then that business with Uzzah, David's baby son, Ananias and Zaphira - the list goes on and that's a top of my head list of God being unmerciful.
I’m not saying at all that there aren’t a lot texts that have to be wrestled with.
But just as you might say it’s error to take what I quoted at face value and ignore the instances you cited, I’d say it’s equally erroneous to take the instances you cited at face value and ignore the many, many times in Scripture that God is described as compassionate, loving and faithful.
The comforting texts and the disturbing texts both have to be held, worked through and wrestled with. And yes, that may be a lifetime of wrestling.
My problem is the comfortable texts seem to be words while the difficult ones are actions - and as I said, actions speak louder. If someone's punching me in the face while telling me they love me I'm not going to believe them.
Put it another way, I don't give a wet fish how many times God is described in positive terms. I care about what he's recorded to have actually done
Are they actions of God, or are they descriptions of actions of God? And if they are descriptions of actions of God, do we have to take into account that they might not be accurate descriptions of actions of God? Should we as Christians have to take into account what we see of God in Jesus in assessing how to read those descriptions of actions of God?
Or put another way, you’ve rejected the fundamentalism that you were once part of, but are you still holding onto that fundamentalism’s insistence that all of those descriptions of God’s actions must be unquestioningly accepted as literal and accurate historical records?
The only way I can actually make sense of it all is complete rejection of Scripture as anything more than the writings of people in a cruel and unjust age creating God in the image of that age - which is an interesting tie-in to my OP about science.
Which leaves God as objectively unknowable in theory as he is in my experience of real life.
Which is fine, but does that mean I'm leaving Christianity behind altogether? Does it matter?
There are plenty of merciful and loving actions to look at. Start with the very creation, which is a thing God didn't have to do, but did out of love and a desire to love what he created. Go on to the planting of Eden, the position of authority and companionship with God that he gave to Adam and Eve; the provision of food, interesting creatures to enjoy, and general beauty; then, after they sinned, the fact that God came looking for them (instead of judging them from afar) and looked into the case, finding the real culprit who tempted them into it and judging him; the promise of a Savior; the clothing of their nakedness (since God knows, fig leaves don't make for good clothing!); the expulsion from Eden (and that WAS mercy--if human beings ate from the tree of life and became immortal with our current psychology and twistedness toward evil, I wouldn't want to see what our world would become very quickly). Okay, let's skip ahead to Abraham, because this is already very long. The choosing of an ordinary idol-worshiping man to be the friend of God and future father of nations, though he had done nothing to deserve such gifts at all; ditto the promises to Sarah, as she too is singled out for these blessings; the birth of Isaac; God's double appearance to Hagar in the wilderness, making her great promises, and saving her life and that of her son; the rescue of Lot and his daughters; the birth of children to Rebekah after 25 years of infertility; the preservation of cheating Jacob during his years away from home at the mercy of his conniving uncle; his protection from Esau (whom God has also blessed greatly, much like Ishmael, though he is not in the line of promise); the birth of children to Rachel; the preservation of Joseph through his various hardships after his brothers sell him as a slave into Egypt; the preservation of Jacob's family through Joseph's forgiveness and help; the preservation of Egypt itself from famine; and so on and so forth and yadda yadda yadda.
This God is an interventionist God, and he intervenes to show mercy even to the "least of these"--the slaves, the shepherds, the outcast, the unwanted. If he doesn't do everything exactly as we would, that's to be expected--"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9) He's under no necessity to explain himself to us, but very often he does--and most of all in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was and is God incarnate.
According to Genesis 3 he inflicted painful childbirth on every pregnant woman to come after Eve. But we can largely ignore that whole business as we know it never happened. Early man had a hard existence like every other creature does with few young making it to adulthood, sickness and suffering.
The rest of this, I'm sorry @Lamb Chopped but it's so cherry picked. You don't get a "not guilty" verdict from pointing out a few nice things you did that have nothing to do with the crimes you're accused of, and the Biblical God's homicide chargesheet is long indeed.
I can't go on ignoring that. This intervenionist God fails to intervene in millions of occasions in the real world compared with the claims of intervention in the OT. That's in addition to his interventions where lots of people end up dead.
@Lamb Chopped when I read your post I just saw a collection of myths and legends. Sorry, they don't speak to me at all.
Obviously mileage can of course differ, but reading them as myth enables them to speak more powerfully to me than would be the case if I read them as literal, historical accounts.
The rest of this, I'm sorry @Lamb Chopped but it's so cherry picked.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how you’re not cherry picking too.
I'm saying what I see. Every "God did this great thing" story seems to come with a "but what about". And none of them are mitigation for the terrible things ascribed to God.
They don't speak to me as literal accounts, and frankly I'm fed up of trying to make them speak to me as myths too, because they don't. Every "God did this wonderful thing" has a horrific story or statement on the next page. It feels like going on an easter egg hunt in a field full of cow pats.
I mean, what positive story do you get from this:
1Then the Lord thundered, “Bring on the men appointed to punish the city! Tell them to bring their weapons with them!” 2Six men soon appeared from the upper gate that faces north, each carrying a deadly weapon in his hand. With them was a man dressed in linen, who carried a writer’s case at his side. They all went into the Temple courtyard and stood beside the bronze altar.
3Then the glory of the God of Israel rose up from between the cherubim, where it had rested, and moved to the entrance of the Temple. And the Lord called to the man dressed in linen who was carrying the writer’s case. 4He said to him, “Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all who weep and sigh because of the detestable sins being committed in their city.”
5Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! 6Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin right here at the Temple.” So they began by killing the seventy leaders.
7“Defile the Temple!” the Lord commanded. “Fill its courtyards with corpses. Go!” So they went and began killing throughout the city.
8While they were out killing, I was all alone. I fell face down on the ground and cried out, “O Sovereign Lord! Will your fury against Jerusalem wipe out everyone left in Israel?”
9Then he said to me, “The sins of the people of Israel and Judah are very, very great. The entire land is full of murder; the city is filled with injustice. They are saying, ‘The Lord doesn’t see it! The Lord has abandoned the land!’ 10So I will not spare them or have any pity on them. I will fully repay them for all they have done.”
11Then the man in linen clothing, who carried the writer’s case, reported back and said, “I have done as you commanded.”
It's horrible however you slice it. God complains about injustice and then goes on a killing spree.
I repeat
Show no mercy; have no pity! 6Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children
The rest of this, I'm sorry @Lamb Chopped but it's so cherry picked.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how you’re not cherry picking too.
I'm saying what I see.
I’m sure you are; I don’t doubt that. I’m simply saying that it seems to me you are engaging in the same cherry picking you say others are doing.
And I never claimed to get a positive story from every passage. I claim to get a positive story from the whole, despite the passages that are unquestionably troubling. That said, I’d be very leery of treating apocalyptic literature as historical literature.
The rest of this, I'm sorry @Lamb Chopped but it's so cherry picked.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how you’re not cherry picking too.
I'm saying what I see.
I’m sure you are; I don’t doubt that. I’m simply saying that it seems to me you are engaging in the same cherry picking you say others are doing.
And I never claimed to get a positive story from every passage. I claim to get a positive story from the whole, despite the passages that are unquestionably troubling.
I'm details oriented. I can't just get by things like that. It's not so much cherry picking from my viewpoint; it's more spotting the rotten apple that makes the whole barrel stink. God should not be giving us tainted barrels. I don't see this as a contest of nice bits outweighing nasty bits. The nasty bits stand on their own and present a massive issue. That may seem unfair to people pointing out the nice bits but in my moral universe it doesn't work like that; a serial killer who's nice to his mum and gives half his money to the kittens' home is still a serial killer.
On wrestling, even for a lifetime - perhaps someone who's done that can share their conclusions rather than everyone having to reinvent the wheel, and many of us fail.
Look. The ONLY thing I was attempting to do was answer the post demanding actions rather than descriptions of mercy. That was what you asked for, wasn't it?
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Look. The ONLY thing I was attempting to do was answer the post demanding actions rather than descriptions of mercy. That was what you asked for, wasn't it?
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Clearly I was a fool to answer at all.
Well actually no. My point was that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow. If I'm beating most of my kids does taking one of them out for ice cream and always being lovely to them get me off the hook? It doesn’t.
God's character is entitled to be complicated. It shouldn't however include homicidal injustice.
I do think God needs someone to defend him because at the moment, for me, here and now, it all looks very bad.
Look. The ONLY thing I was attempting to do was answer the post demanding actions rather than descriptions of mercy. That was what you asked for, wasn't it?
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Clearly I was a fool to answer at all.
Well actually no. My point was that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow.
To you. To you, and to many, they ring hollow. And I’m not going to tell you that your reaction and your assessment is wrong, because it’s your reaction and your assessment.
But I will say that your claim “that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow,” itself rings hollow to many, many people, both Christian and Jewish.
You unquestionably are the one person who can say how you see it, and I’m not about to tell you’re mistaken about how you see it.
But I will say that how you see it isn’t the only way to see it.
I wasn't in a good place generally last night so apologies for tone.
I think what I'm driving at is that I can't take an "eat the meat, spit out the bones" approach where the nice bits are taken at face value and the nasty bits set to one side. Rather I need a universal approach that can cope with both. And, going back to the OP, with the entirely different universe we inhabit from the one the Bible writers thought they inhabited.
There's a John Finnemore sketch where a teacher at a visit to the Roman Baths is desperately trying to get the kids to see the Romans as people "just like us, today!" (the kids weren't buying it). I think the ancients really, really, weren't people like us at all.
Two things can be true at the same time, it is not just about personal preference.
Some people think that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English that ever lived. Of those, a subset spend a lot of time working through the details of the plot, the words used and so on. Even amongst those who are interested in literature in this way there are some who just dislike everything about Shakespeare. There is some blockage they cannot get over despite hearing other people say how great it is. Maybe there are even people who once were able to get meaning for their lives from Shakespeare who grew to hate it.
Rowan Williams describes the Bible as an ongoing argument with itself. So Ezra and Nehemiah command the expulsion of non-Israelites from the people and Ruth describes King David as descended from an outsider.
The Bible opens with two contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in the same document. The world is not created in the same order in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2.
(Even in the NT we have differences in emphasis between the Gospels, and between Paul and James; and Rowan Williams has remarked on the contrast in Revelation between the sublimity of some passages and the "green ballpoint pushed into cheap paper" of others.)
I don't think the Bible presents itself as having a consistent message about God's character. It presents itself as a collection of inconsistent messages about God's character, and invites us to see how they and we too misapprehend God or at best fall short.
It may seem odd to say one should read a collection of two to three thousand year old documents as postmodern but I think modernism/postmodernism in literature originated out of a desire to write more like the Bible.
Look. The ONLY thing I was attempting to do was answer the post demanding actions rather than descriptions of mercy. That was what you asked for, wasn't it?
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Clearly I was a fool to answer at all.
Well actually no. My point was that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow. If I'm beating most of my kids does taking one of them out for ice cream and always being lovely to them get me off the hook? It doesn’t.
God's character is entitled to be complicated. It shouldn't however include homicidal injustice.
I do think God needs someone to defend him because at the moment, for me, here and now, it all looks very bad.
I think the point is that people are very good at shifting the blame. If they can also claim that the orders came from above, so much the better.
I tend to view the various scriptures as saying more about the communities that produced them than they do about God.
It may not help you at all but I’ve found the idea that the OT contains varying and developing concepts of God very helpful. There are texts which seem clearly to represent a tribal God (a King among Gods) who needed to eradicate the influence of these lesser Gods. And others in which God is the only God, a light to the Gentiles. Compassionate and Just.
This isn’t cherry picking or a denial of the inspiration of scripture. But it recognises the human, culture-related, writings still reveal something of the divine. However partially or imperfectly. It’s helpful to understand them this way, impossible and not helpful to harmonise them without straining understanding further than it can go.
Thats one of the things that separates me from the Fundamentalists who generally regard me as a liberal. That’s not a label that bothers me.
I wasn't in a good place generally last night so apologies for tone.
No worries at all, @KarlLB. And I apologize if I got testy.
I do respect where you stand; I know lots of people stand there. It’s an honestly held and understandable position, so I really don’t want my responses to suggest that I don’t acknowledge that.
Rowan Williams describes the Bible as an ongoing argument with itself. So Ezra and Nehemiah command the expulsion of non-Israelites from the people and Ruth describes King David as descended from an outsider.
. . . .
I don't think the Bible presents itself as having a consistent message about God's character. It presents itself as a collection of inconsistent messages about God's character, and invites us to see how they and we too misapprehend God or at best fall short.
It may seem odd to say one should read a collection of two to three thousand year old documents as postmodern but I think modernism/postmodernism in literature originated out of a desire to write more like the Bible.
I have mentioned “The Bible Project” on these boards before. One of the things I’ve become convinced of after listening to their podcasts for years is the Bible as not just a collection of books rather than a book, but as a collection of meditation literature—writings that are not necessarily intended to be taken at face value, but rather writings in which meaning is discerned through continued re-reading and reflection, not just of individual passages, but of multiple passages, including contradictory ones, reflected on together.
The Bible opens with two contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in the same document. The world is not created in the same order in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2.
I’m going to push back on this a little bit. The two passages are contradictory if they are both taken as something like historical accounts. But if they are read as attempts to describe something of the underlying reality of creation—sort of akin to Jesus’s parables and “the kingdom of Heaven is like . . .”—I’d say they can be seen as complimentary rather than contradictory.
I’ll mention one other thing that I find carries some weight with me; it may not for others. And that is that I have to think that if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, Judaism would look much different from how it has looked and does look. That Judaism, reading and reflecting on the Hebrew Scriptures with all its contradictions for thousands of years, sees God as faithful, loving and compassionate means something to me.
In a similar way, I think if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, the message and ministry of Jesus—who said he had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, and who said those who had seen him had seen God—would have looked quite different.
I’ll mention one other thing that I find carries some weight with me; it may not for others. And that is that I have to think that if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, Judaism would look much different from how it has looked and does look. That Judaism, reading and reflecting on the Hebrew Scriptures with all its contradictions for thousands of years, sees God as faithful, loving and compassionate means something to me.
In a similar way, I think if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, the message and ministry of Jesus—who said he had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, and who said those who had seen him had seen God—would have looked quite different.
Count me in.
Some of the accounts in the OT do contradict the Psalmist’s view that the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. Also I do like Dafyd’s reminder of Rowan Williams’ observation that the Bible is an ongoing argument with itself. Pretty spot on.
We might prefer something clearer. more unified, less self-argumentative. But that’s not what we’ve got.
In Christian, secularised-Christian and post-Christian societies, I'm inclined to think that a preoccupation with our death as something bad, to be avoided, is more a consequence of Christianity than a pre-existing problem that Christianity solves.
Look. The ONLY thing I was attempting to do was answer the post demanding actions rather than descriptions of mercy. That was what you asked for, wasn't it?
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Clearly I was a fool to answer at all.
Is that what @KarlLB did? Demand? Interesting. Your initial comment, @Lamb Chopped was, "God's personality is always to have mercy..." [emphases mine] which is a pretty open & shut declaration. I think pushback against such claims is reasonable and even warranted.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
The thing about this, @Nick Tamen, is that in these verses it's God himself describing himself. It also helps to include the entire bit, because it opens up all kinds of issues:
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
Things go downhill rather quickly and steeply after 'faithfulness.' This is shortly before Good nicknames himself "Jealous." Yikes.
And as far as Creation goes, if we can take off the rose-colored glasses for a minute, it may be the first documented case of Engineered Obsolescence we have. Again, the Omniscience question reemerges. Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil really the absolute best option? And so some of us wrestle, and extol the virtues of wrestling, and yes, those exist. It's just that whenever I hear that, I'm reminded of the most famous instance of wrestling with God -- Jacob -- and how God cheated and still didn't quite win. No one ever preaches on that, LOL. God has been the beneficiary of a double standard ever since: when things go well or in one's favor we're told that God should get credit, but when things go otherwise we're told that God moves in mysterious ways.
I’ll post here what I posted on (I think) the synergy thread, which is that it’s my understanding that the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that first found in Exodus 34:6—“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness.”
The thing about this, @Nick Tamen, is that in these verses it's God himself describing himself. It also helps to include the entire bit, because it opens up all kinds of issues:
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
Things go downhill rather quickly and steeply after 'faithfulness.' This is shortly before Good nicknames himself "Jealous." Yikes.
Fair points. A few additional points I’d make.
First, it’s my understanding—I’m no expert here but am relying on other sources who are experts in Hebrew—that “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” is a Hebrew idiomatic way of saying something along the lines of “your bad choices have an effect beyond you; they ripple out to your family, until course is corrected, and I will let that play out.”
Second, I note the contrast between “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” and “keeping steadfast love to the thousandth generation.” That seems to me a very clear statement that God’s steadfast love is stronger than and will outlast human sinfulness. I also note there’s no condition placed on God’s steadfast love, like “if you love me.” It’s simply “I keep steadfast love to the thousandth generation.”
Third, and in connection with Rowan Williams’ comment about the Bible being in argument with itself, elsewhere the Hebrew Bible explicitly rejects any idea of generational sin or generational punishment. There’s Deuteronomy 24:16 (“Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.”). And there’s Ezekiel 18:20 (“A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be their own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be their own.”)
Fourth, I didn’t quote what comes after Exodus 34:6 because I was citing it as the most quoted description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. I may be wrong, and I haven’t looked it up to verify, but my recollection is that when Exodus 35:6 is quoted elsewhere, it is generally quoted without what comes afterward. Another instance of the Bible in argument with itself?
And fifth, as I noted recently in another thread, my understanding is that the Hebrew word translated as jealous means faithful and desiring faithfulness in return. It does not meant envious.
I completely get that you and others may not find any of those thoughts helpful, much less persuasive. That’s okay.
In Christian, secularised-Christian and post-Christian societies, I'm inclined to think that a preoccupation with our death as something bad, to be avoided, is more a consequence of Christianity than a pre-existing problem that Christianity solves.
Achilles in the Odyssey says that he would rather be a workman on a peasant farm in the land of the living than king of the dead. Definitely pre-Christian.
Going back further, most of the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh is driven by Gilgamesh's search for immortality.
I hadn’t seen that but I’m not surprised. The visiting preacher advised that the quality of life before death was a Luke 4 thing..
“ 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4 is often described as the Kingdom of God agenda and as Christians we are encouraged to support that agenda, embrace the Kingdom values which underpin it. It’s a “this life” thing not a “next life” thing. As the Christian Aid slogan and underlying purposes points out. Living for others is a very good life.
Look away for just a few minutes and off a thread goes in a new direction!
To the issue of cherry picking. I could actually show as many verses in the Hebrew Scriptures that show God's hesed (steadfast love) as I can showing God's judgement in the New Testament.
In a philosophy of science course I took, I remember it is quite possible to find what I am looking for if I have a hypothesis. Same in religion. If I think God is angry, I can find an angry God throughout the Bible. If I think God is merciful I can find a loving God throughout the Bible.
I like what was said about the Bible is in a constant debate with itself. I get the picture of a group of old rabbi's constantly arguing about what the Scripture is.
I think we Christians (and non believers, for that matter) want to put the Judeo-Christian traditions in a nice box, that has a little bow tie on top, but the Judeo Christian heritage is a wild, untamed covenant story of God pursuing humanity through judgement, mercy, exile, incarnation, death, and resurrection--never neat, never boxed, always alive.
Look away for just a few minutes and off a thread goes in a new direction!
To the issue of cherry picking. I could actually show as many verses in the Hebrew Scriptures that show God's hesed (steadfast love) as I can showing God's judgement in the New Testament.
In a philosophy of science course I took, I remember it is quite possible to find what I am looking for if I have a hypothesis. Same in religion. If I think God is angry, I can find an angry God throughout the Bible. If I think God is merciful I can find a loving God throughout the Bible.
I like what was said about the Bible is in a constant debate with itself. I get the picture of a group of old rabbi's constantly arguing about what the Scripture is.
I think we Christians (and non believers, for that matter) want to put the Judeo-Christian traditions in a nice box, that has a little bow tie on top, but the Judeo Christian heritage is a wild, untamed covenant story of God pursuing humanity through judgement, mercy, exile, incarnation, death, and resurrection--never neat, never boxed, always alive.
As the average age of Ship contributors increases, that picture of us as an elderly group constantly arguing about what our various understandings mean about life both made me smile and resonates with what goes on here. I’m not sure how wild and untamed we are individually, but there’s quite a lot of wild and untamed in our heritage.
Gosh, Rowan Williams is good! He’s certainly got a wild and untamed beard!
You might have put into words what I still appreciate this website when it gets argumentative and unrestful.
I’ve heard it said that there was (and maybe still is) a synagogue tradition of listening to what ever the Torah reading was and then going off to argue the toss about what it means. Agreement was not required. That strikes me as a pretty good practice. Not sure how wild and untamed it ever got but a bit of verbal wild and untamed can lead to better understanding of and sympathy with our diversity. Or temporary estrangement.
Whatever. I think it’s a heck of a lot better than unthinking, unquestioned, compelled unity. That’s not unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It’s a form of Spiritual enslavement. I don’t think God is very keen on it.
“A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still”.
I feel a song coming on.
Abba Father, let me be
Yours and Yours alone.
May my will forever be
Ever more Your own. Never let my heart grow cold. Never let me go
Abba Father, let me be
Yours and Yours alone
Just seen a news item about 97 year old wing walker Betty Bromage who has been raising money for stroke victims. She did something similar when she was a mere 87. In wing walking she stands upright on the wing of a biplane and remains there when the plane takes off and lands. This time she asked the pilot to do a loop and a barrel toll while she was on the wing.
When asked about it she said”There are lots of things I can’t do but this is something I can”. She said her family thought she was crazy but she was a glad she could still do it and for such a good cause. She also quoted this motto (from a Quaker missionary)
I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”
Good for Betty! Amazingly she’s planning to do it again on her 100th birthday - if she lives that long. I wouldn’t put it past her.
That’s pretty wild of course. But looks well in line with that Quaker quote. Which also looks well in line with what I and others have called the Kingdom agenda.
Paul Kingsnorth is preparing to publish a book on 'Wild Saints'.
It will be a series of short imaginative vignettes on the lives of Saints - both Eastern and Western, pre and post-Schism - who went off and did wild and whacky things - living in the woods, speaking truth to power, becoming Holy Fools ...
I heard him talk of it at a very good 'convention' in Walsingham alongside the 'mythopoetic' story-teller Dr Martin Shaw and the highly estimable Dr Rowan Williams.
Issues of cosmology and 'creation' came up there - and all in the context of story - that was the over-riding emphasis.
An elderly and very lovely RC guy observed to me that what struck him most was how spiritual truths were presented in 'story' - in 'narrative' form.
No disrespect intended here to our RC friends but he told me that as a boy in a Catholic high school they were inculcated with dogma. It was drummed into them by rote, rather like the multiplication tables.
He lost his father only to find it again in later life. His face was aglow as he told me how much this shift from dogmatic brow-beating to 'organic' story-telling had meant to him and how he hoped the next generation can pick up and run with that.
I'm curious about making it count, I mean, what is included here? Or, what is excluded? For me, life is life, I can't make it more or less meaningful, or enriched, than it is right now. A grain of sand, maybe, contains everything.
In Christian, secularised-Christian and post-Christian societies, I'm inclined to think that a preoccupation with our death as something bad, to be avoided, is more a consequence of Christianity than a pre-existing problem that Christianity solves.
Achilles in the Odyssey says that he would rather be a workman on a peasant farm in the land of the living than king of the dead. Definitely pre-Christian.
Going back further, most of the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh is driven by Gilgamesh's search for immortality.
Thanks, Dafyd. Would it be more associated with the development of linear beliefs about human existence?
I'm curious about making it count, I mean, what is included here? Or, what is excluded? For me, life is life, I can't make it more or less meaningful, or enriched, than it is right now. A grain of sand, maybe, contains everything.
I think we can make a difference. Preferably one which is motivated by benevolence. That’s what I meant.
I’ve known quite a few people, now dead, about whom I would say the world is a better place for them having lived in it. Their lives made a significant difference for the better for others. I suppose they may have made some folks worse but I never heard of any.
I'm curious about making it count, I mean, what is included here? Or, what is excluded? For me, life is life, I can't make it more or less meaningful, or enriched, than it is right now. A grain of sand, maybe, contains everything.
I think we can make a difference. Preferably one which is motivated by benevolence. That’s what I meant.
I’ve known quite a few people, now dead, about whom I would say the world is a better place for them having lived in it. Their lives made a significant difference for the better for others. I suppose they may have made some folks worse but I never heard of any.
Yes, I get that. I guess it's a very Christian idea, but I seem to have moved away from it. I don't like ranking people really, they are all valuable.
First, it’s my understanding—I’m no expert here but am relying on other sources who are experts in Hebrew—that “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” is a Hebrew idiomatic way of saying something along the lines of “your bad choices have an effect beyond you; they ripple out to your family, until course is corrected, and I will let that play out.”
I appreciate that distinction, and I'm glad we have Biblical Scholars weighing in regularly about what the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words are/were, as well as what they meant or most likely meant back then. I think it's a shame that these idiomatic passages are interwoven with passages to be taken (seemingly) at face value, which is how I infer you take the scriptures quoted in your third point. Deuteronomy 21 gives instruction re: when and how to have your rebellious son stoned to death. Idiomatic, yes? No?! Yikes.
Second, I note the contrast between “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” and “keeping steadfast love to the thousandth generation.” That seems to me a very clear statement that God’s steadfast love is stronger than and will outlast human sinfulness. I also note there’s no condition placed on God’s steadfast love, like “if you love me.” It’s simply “I keep steadfast love to the thousandth generation.”
I'd only muse that outlasting human sinfulness (if you mean that in the aggregate) is different than outlasting the sinfulness of any one human. That puts the scary right back into it. And of course, inference is everything.
Third, and in connection with Rowan Williams’ comment about the Bible being in argument with itself, elsewhere the Hebrew Bible explicitly rejects any idea of generational sin or generational punishment. There’s Deuteronomy 24:16 (“Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.”). And there’s Ezekiel 18:20 (“A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be their own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be their own.”)
Well, sadly, there's also Exodus 21:7-11 which details selling one's daughter into slavery among other revolting topics. I don't have to tell you that this passage was omitted from the RCL.
Fourth, I didn’t quote what comes after Exodus 34:6 because I was citing it as the most quoted description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. I may be wrong, and I haven’t looked it up to verify, but my recollection is that when Exodus 35:6 is quoted elsewhere, it is generally quoted without what comes afterward. Another instance of the Bible in argument with itself?
I guess I'd say that I think it's helpful to keep clear delineations. I think it's most helpful to consider the Bible as an anthology of mostly distinct books, and not one book. I also like to think that when subsequent authors cited only part Exodus 35:6, they were doing what some of us do now -- editing toward a more thoughtful, reasonable, palatable, useful text. That's a much friendlier consideration than subterfuge, which is, of course, a possibility.
And fifth, as I noted recently in another thread, my understanding is that the Hebrew word translated as jealous means faithful and desiring faithfulness in return. It does not meant envious.
Excellent. Let's do alma/virgin next, and see what we might untangle.
I completely get that you and others may not find any of those thoughts helpful, much less persuasive. That’s okay.
First, it’s my understanding—I’m no expert here but am relying on other sources who are experts in Hebrew—that “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” is a Hebrew idiomatic way of saying something along the lines of “your bad choices have an effect beyond you; they ripple out to your family, until course is corrected, and I will let that play out.”
I appreciate that distinction, and I'm glad we have Biblical Scholars weighing in regularly about what the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words are/were, as well as what they meant or most likely meant back then. I think it's a shame that these idiomatic passages are interwoven with passages to be taken (seemingly) at face value, which is how I infer you take the scriptures quoted in your third point. Deuteronomy 21 gives instruction re: when and how to have your rebellious son stoned to death. Idiomatic, yes? No?! Yikes.
I don’t think I’d say that I necessarily take the passages quoted in my third point at face value, at least not per se. Rather, it’s more I say “These passages seem to be saying different things. What do we do with that?” For me, a major thing that means is that I have to remember
I’m reading writings not only translated from a different language but coming from a culture very different from our own with cultural assumptions very different from our own. And that means “face value” is a very tricky thing—what I see as “face value” may not be at all what an ancient Israelite saw as “face value.”
And that means I have to rely on scholars who can help me translate, both linguistically and culturally. And when it comes to the Hebrew Scriptures, for me it means I’m particularly interested in how Judaism, which has lived with these texts for millennia, understands them.
In that regard, I found this from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the “third and fourth generation” thing. He doesn’t bring up the idiom consideration, but he does square the various texts in a way similar to what I described.
I’ll add that I heard a word study on the commandment against killing recently, that argued that modern translations that render the Hebrew “you shall not murder” are not a good translation. The argument was that Hebrew had both words that mean “murder” and “kill,” and the word used in the commandment encompasses killing for any reason, even accidentally. The argument raised the question of whether punishments of death elsewhere in the Law were intended to be read in tension with the commandment not to kill. The point being considered was that the Law shouldn’t be read as a statute book. (Does calling the Torah “the Law” in English when the Hebrew meaning is more “Instruction” color how we English-speakers read it?). Rather, it was suggested, the Torah presents a variety of writings and perspectives intended to prompt consideration of what true justice is, and what the implications of taking a life for whatever reason are.
I’m still thinking through that and what I think of it.
Dragging back to the OP - I learnt yesterday that the myelin sheaths that our nervous systems depend on for fast propagation of signals came about as a result of an retroviral insertion - essentially a fish got sick from a viral infection, recovered, and passed on viral DNA to its offspring which were eventually able to benefit from the faster nervous signals.
I think that opens up a load of questions in terms of God's intention in creation and how that relates to the natural processes. Did God intend that particular insertion? Was he dependent on contingency? Did God actually create a block universe in which past and future are just different places, already set, between which we pass propelled by the laws of physics?
We're well past sickness being a result of the fall here. Without that viral infection we would not exist.
If anyone is actually interested, this person seems to be addressing some of the issues I'm looking at academically - there's a link also with the question of impassibility: https://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/person/dr-emily-qureshi-hurst
Comments
We were created by an evolutionary process driven by, and in an environment containing, death. Life itself is driven by death. Because of death it must reproduce so its genes have a chance of cheating death. In the sense that evolution creates anything for anything, we were created for death.
As humans we object to death because we don't want to die and cease to exist as individuals. Evolutionarily, an organism that doesn't try to stay alive doesn't reproduce. We don't like pain because it hurts; we don't like death because it stops us from reproducing, or indeed helping our children reproduce successfully (what you might call the menopause hypothesis - we evolved this extra stage of life beyond our own reproduction so we could help our genes continue into and through our grandchildren.)
I sympathize with you, @KarlLB. I too wrestle with these questions. Also the questions of Omnipotence and Omniscience, both of which have been detailed on these boards many times.
Up above, @Lamb Chopped, you said that "God's personality is always to have mercy..." (Omnibenevolence? That's my word, not yours.) I'm curious about this assertion, because my reading of the OT seems to reveal something about God's personality quite different than mercy.
Atheism is not a worldview. It's an inability to buy into a worldview. That doesn't mean atheism flatly rejects the numinous, for lack of a better term. It just doesn't park it at the feet of God. Time to resurrect (see what I did there) one of my favorite jokes:
Q: Where was God before he created Heaven and Earth?
A: He was busy making Hell for those who would ask such questions.
Based on subsequent writings I’m inclined to believe that Russell was overstating his own case for effect.
Whatever logical analysis underpins our beliefs, most people do believe in meaningful choices in their lives. There is certainly life before death regardless of what we may believe about life after death.
It’s one of favourite oft-repeated quote on these discussion forums. “It is a privilege to live this day and the next.”
How we make best use of that privilege is a central question to which we must find meaningful answers.
Actions speak louder than words. Genesis 3, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, the conquest of Canaan, that business with Achan and then that business with Uzzah, David's baby son, Ananias and Zaphira - the list goes on and that's a top of my head list of God being unmerciful.
But just as you might say it’s error to take what I quoted at face value and ignore the instances you cited, I’d say it’s equally erroneous to take the instances you cited at face value and ignore the many, many times in Scripture that God is described as compassionate, loving and faithful.
The comforting texts and the disturbing texts both have to be held, worked through and wrestled with. And yes, that may be a lifetime of wrestling.
My problem is the comfortable texts seem to be words while the difficult ones are actions - and as I said, actions speak louder. If someone's punching me in the face while telling me they love me I'm not going to believe them.
Put it another way, I don't give a wet fish how many times God is described in positive terms. I care about what he's recorded to have actually done
Or put another way, you’ve rejected the fundamentalism that you were once part of, but are you still holding onto that fundamentalism’s insistence that all of those descriptions of God’s actions must be unquestioningly accepted as literal and accurate historical records?
Which leaves God as objectively unknowable in theory as he is in my experience of real life.
Which is fine, but does that mean I'm leaving Christianity behind altogether? Does it matter?
This God is an interventionist God, and he intervenes to show mercy even to the "least of these"--the slaves, the shepherds, the outcast, the unwanted. If he doesn't do everything exactly as we would, that's to be expected--"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9) He's under no necessity to explain himself to us, but very often he does--and most of all in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was and is God incarnate.
The rest of this, I'm sorry @Lamb Chopped but it's so cherry picked. You don't get a "not guilty" verdict from pointing out a few nice things you did that have nothing to do with the crimes you're accused of, and the Biblical God's homicide chargesheet is long indeed.
I can't go on ignoring that. This intervenionist God fails to intervene in millions of occasions in the real world compared with the claims of intervention in the OT. That's in addition to his interventions where lots of people end up dead.
Obviously mileage can of course differ, but reading them as myth enables them to speak more powerfully to me than would be the case if I read them as literal, historical accounts.
I'm saying what I see. Every "God did this great thing" story seems to come with a "but what about". And none of them are mitigation for the terrible things ascribed to God.
They don't speak to me as literal accounts, and frankly I'm fed up of trying to make them speak to me as myths too, because they don't. Every "God did this wonderful thing" has a horrific story or statement on the next page. It feels like going on an easter egg hunt in a field full of cow pats.
I mean, what positive story do you get from this:
It's horrible however you slice it. God complains about injustice and then goes on a killing spree.
I repeat
Show no mercy; have no pity! 6Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children
And I never claimed to get a positive story from every passage. I claim to get a positive story from the whole, despite the passages that are unquestionably troubling. That said, I’d be very leery of treating apocalyptic literature as historical literature.
I'm details oriented. I can't just get by things like that. It's not so much cherry picking from my viewpoint; it's more spotting the rotten apple that makes the whole barrel stink. God should not be giving us tainted barrels. I don't see this as a contest of nice bits outweighing nasty bits. The nasty bits stand on their own and present a massive issue. That may seem unfair to people pointing out the nice bits but in my moral universe it doesn't work like that; a serial killer who's nice to his mum and gives half his money to the kittens' home is still a serial killer.
On wrestling, even for a lifetime - perhaps someone who's done that can share their conclusions rather than everyone having to reinvent the wheel, and many of us fail.
I am not here to convert you, or God forbid, to defend God, as if he needed my services. I do not appreciate being jumped on to justify every issue anybody ever had with God.
Cherry picked? I dare say it is. It would be cherry picked if you demanded a similar list of my own actions that could be called merciful. My personality and my actions cannot be summed up by a single adjective. Neither can God's.
Clearly I was a fool to answer at all.
Well actually no. My point was that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow. If I'm beating most of my kids does taking one of them out for ice cream and always being lovely to them get me off the hook? It doesn’t.
God's character is entitled to be complicated. It shouldn't however include homicidal injustice.
I do think God needs someone to defend him because at the moment, for me, here and now, it all looks very bad.
But I will say that your claim “that so many of God's reported actions in the OT are horrible that claims to be loving and merciful ring hollow,” itself rings hollow to many, many people, both Christian and Jewish.
You unquestionably are the one person who can say how you see it, and I’m not about to tell you’re mistaken about how you see it.
But I will say that how you see it isn’t the only way to see it.
I think what I'm driving at is that I can't take an "eat the meat, spit out the bones" approach where the nice bits are taken at face value and the nasty bits set to one side. Rather I need a universal approach that can cope with both. And, going back to the OP, with the entirely different universe we inhabit from the one the Bible writers thought they inhabited.
There's a John Finnemore sketch where a teacher at a visit to the Roman Baths is desperately trying to get the kids to see the Romans as people "just like us, today!" (the kids weren't buying it). I think the ancients really, really, weren't people like us at all.
Some people think that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English that ever lived. Of those, a subset spend a lot of time working through the details of the plot, the words used and so on. Even amongst those who are interested in literature in this way there are some who just dislike everything about Shakespeare. There is some blockage they cannot get over despite hearing other people say how great it is. Maybe there are even people who once were able to get meaning for their lives from Shakespeare who grew to hate it.
The Bible opens with two contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in the same document. The world is not created in the same order in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2.
(Even in the NT we have differences in emphasis between the Gospels, and between Paul and James; and Rowan Williams has remarked on the contrast in Revelation between the sublimity of some passages and the "green ballpoint pushed into cheap paper" of others.)
I don't think the Bible presents itself as having a consistent message about God's character. It presents itself as a collection of inconsistent messages about God's character, and invites us to see how they and we too misapprehend God or at best fall short.
It may seem odd to say one should read a collection of two to three thousand year old documents as postmodern but I think modernism/postmodernism in literature originated out of a desire to write more like the Bible.
I think the point is that people are very good at shifting the blame. If they can also claim that the orders came from above, so much the better.
I tend to view the various scriptures as saying more about the communities that produced them than they do about God.
It may not help you at all but I’ve found the idea that the OT contains varying and developing concepts of God very helpful. There are texts which seem clearly to represent a tribal God (a King among Gods) who needed to eradicate the influence of these lesser Gods. And others in which God is the only God, a light to the Gentiles. Compassionate and Just.
This isn’t cherry picking or a denial of the inspiration of scripture. But it recognises the human, culture-related, writings still reveal something of the divine. However partially or imperfectly. It’s helpful to understand them this way, impossible and not helpful to harmonise them without straining understanding further than it can go.
Thats one of the things that separates me from the Fundamentalists who generally regard me as a liberal. That’s not a label that bothers me.
I do respect where you stand; I know lots of people stand there. It’s an honestly held and understandable position, so I really don’t want my responses to suggest that I don’t acknowledge that.
I have mentioned “The Bible Project” on these boards before. One of the things I’ve become convinced of after listening to their podcasts for years is the Bible as not just a collection of books rather than a book, but as a collection of meditation literature—writings that are not necessarily intended to be taken at face value, but rather writings in which meaning is discerned through continued re-reading and reflection, not just of individual passages, but of multiple passages, including contradictory ones, reflected on together.
I’m going to push back on this a little bit. The two passages are contradictory if they are both taken as something like historical accounts. But if they are read as attempts to describe something of the underlying reality of creation—sort of akin to Jesus’s parables and “the kingdom of Heaven is like . . .”—I’d say they can be seen as complimentary rather than contradictory.
I’ll mention one other thing that I find carries some weight with me; it may not for others. And that is that I have to think that if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, Judaism would look much different from how it has looked and does look. That Judaism, reading and reflecting on the Hebrew Scriptures with all its contradictions for thousands of years, sees God as faithful, loving and compassionate means something to me.
In a similar way, I think if the unavoidable overriding portrait of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of a violent, vindictive and cruel God, the message and ministry of Jesus—who said he had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, and who said those who had seen him had seen God—would have looked quite different.
Count me in.
Some of the accounts in the OT do contradict the Psalmist’s view that the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. Also I do like Dafyd’s reminder of Rowan Williams’ observation that the Bible is an ongoing argument with itself. Pretty spot on.
We might prefer something clearer. more unified, less self-argumentative. But that’s not what we’ve got.
Is that what @KarlLB did? Demand? Interesting. Your initial comment, @Lamb Chopped was, "God's personality is always to have mercy..." [emphases mine] which is a pretty open & shut declaration. I think pushback against such claims is reasonable and even warranted.
The thing about this, @Nick Tamen, is that in these verses it's God himself describing himself. It also helps to include the entire bit, because it opens up all kinds of issues:
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
Things go downhill rather quickly and steeply after 'faithfulness.' This is shortly before Good nicknames himself "Jealous." Yikes.
And as far as Creation goes, if we can take off the rose-colored glasses for a minute, it may be the first documented case of Engineered Obsolescence we have. Again, the Omniscience question reemerges. Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil really the absolute best option? And so some of us wrestle, and extol the virtues of wrestling, and yes, those exist. It's just that whenever I hear that, I'm reminded of the most famous instance of wrestling with God -- Jacob -- and how God cheated and still didn't quite win. No one ever preaches on that, LOL. God has been the beneficiary of a double standard ever since: when things go well or in one's favor we're told that God should get credit, but when things go otherwise we're told that God moves in mysterious ways.
Yeek! This merciful God has it in for you for what your grandfather did!
This is the grim stuff I'm talking about.
First, it’s my understanding—I’m no expert here but am relying on other sources who are experts in Hebrew—that “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” is a Hebrew idiomatic way of saying something along the lines of “your bad choices have an effect beyond you; they ripple out to your family, until course is corrected, and I will let that play out.”
Second, I note the contrast between “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” and “keeping steadfast love to the thousandth generation.” That seems to me a very clear statement that God’s steadfast love is stronger than and will outlast human sinfulness. I also note there’s no condition placed on God’s steadfast love, like “if you love me.” It’s simply “I keep steadfast love to the thousandth generation.”
Third, and in connection with Rowan Williams’ comment about the Bible being in argument with itself, elsewhere the Hebrew Bible explicitly rejects any idea of generational sin or generational punishment. There’s Deuteronomy 24:16 (“Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.”). And there’s Ezekiel 18:20 (“A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be their own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be their own.”)
Fourth, I didn’t quote what comes after Exodus 34:6 because I was citing it as the most quoted description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. I may be wrong, and I haven’t looked it up to verify, but my recollection is that when Exodus 35:6 is quoted elsewhere, it is generally quoted without what comes afterward. Another instance of the Bible in argument with itself?
And fifth, as I noted recently in another thread, my understanding is that the Hebrew word translated as jealous means faithful and desiring faithfulness in return. It does not meant envious.
I completely get that you and others may not find any of those thoughts helpful, much less persuasive. That’s okay.
Going back further, most of the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh is driven by Gilgamesh's search for immortality.
Which recalls the Christian Aid slogan: "we believe in life before death".
I hadn’t seen that but I’m not surprised. The visiting preacher advised that the quality of life before death was a Luke 4 thing..
“ 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
That post is pretty cryptic, To clarify.
Luke 4 is often described as the Kingdom of God agenda and as Christians we are encouraged to support that agenda, embrace the Kingdom values which underpin it. It’s a “this life” thing not a “next life” thing. As the Christian Aid slogan and underlying purposes points out. Living for others is a very good life.
To the issue of cherry picking. I could actually show as many verses in the Hebrew Scriptures that show God's hesed (steadfast love) as I can showing God's judgement in the New Testament.
In a philosophy of science course I took, I remember it is quite possible to find what I am looking for if I have a hypothesis. Same in religion. If I think God is angry, I can find an angry God throughout the Bible. If I think God is merciful I can find a loving God throughout the Bible.
I like what was said about the Bible is in a constant debate with itself. I get the picture of a group of old rabbi's constantly arguing about what the Scripture is.
I think we Christians (and non believers, for that matter) want to put the Judeo-Christian traditions in a nice box, that has a little bow tie on top, but the Judeo Christian heritage is a wild, untamed covenant story of God pursuing humanity through judgement, mercy, exile, incarnation, death, and resurrection--never neat, never boxed, always alive.
Nice on @Gramps49!
As the average age of Ship contributors increases, that picture of us as an elderly group constantly arguing about what our various understandings mean about life both made me smile and resonates with what goes on here. I’m not sure how wild and untamed we are individually, but there’s quite a lot of wild and untamed in our heritage.
Gosh, Rowan Williams is good! He’s certainly got a wild and untamed beard!
You might have put into words what I still appreciate this website when it gets argumentative and unrestful.
I’ve heard it said that there was (and maybe still is) a synagogue tradition of listening to what ever the Torah reading was and then going off to argue the toss about what it means. Agreement was not required. That strikes me as a pretty good practice. Not sure how wild and untamed it ever got but a bit of verbal wild and untamed can lead to better understanding of and sympathy with our diversity. Or temporary estrangement.
Whatever. I think it’s a heck of a lot better than unthinking, unquestioned, compelled unity. That’s not unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It’s a form of Spiritual enslavement. I don’t think God is very keen on it.
“A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still”.
I feel a song coming on.
Never let our hearts grow cold.
Just seen a news item about 97 year old wing walker Betty Bromage who has been raising money for stroke victims. She did something similar when she was a mere 87. In wing walking she stands upright on the wing of a biplane and remains there when the plane takes off and lands. This time she asked the pilot to do a loop and a barrel toll while she was on the wing.
When asked about it she said”There are lots of things I can’t do but this is something I can”. She said her family thought she was crazy but she was a glad she could still do it and for such a good cause. She also quoted this motto (from a Quaker missionary)
Good for Betty! Amazingly she’s planning to do it again on her 100th birthday - if she lives that long. I wouldn’t put it past her.
That’s pretty wild of course. But looks well in line with that Quaker quote. Which also looks well in line with what I and others have called the Kingdom agenda.
There is life before death. Let’s make it count.
T S Eliot.
Paul Kingsnorth is preparing to publish a book on 'Wild Saints'.
It will be a series of short imaginative vignettes on the lives of Saints - both Eastern and Western, pre and post-Schism - who went off and did wild and whacky things - living in the woods, speaking truth to power, becoming Holy Fools ...
I heard him talk of it at a very good 'convention' in Walsingham alongside the 'mythopoetic' story-teller Dr Martin Shaw and the highly estimable Dr Rowan Williams.
Issues of cosmology and 'creation' came up there - and all in the context of story - that was the over-riding emphasis.
An elderly and very lovely RC guy observed to me that what struck him most was how spiritual truths were presented in 'story' - in 'narrative' form.
No disrespect intended here to our RC friends but he told me that as a boy in a Catholic high school they were inculcated with dogma. It was drummed into them by rote, rather like the multiplication tables.
He lost his father only to find it again in later life. His face was aglow as he told me how much this shift from dogmatic brow-beating to 'organic' story-telling had meant to him and how he hoped the next generation can pick up and run with that.
I hope so too.
Old men, let us be explorers!
I’ve known quite a few people, now dead, about whom I would say the world is a better place for them having lived in it. Their lives made a significant difference for the better for others. I suppose they may have made some folks worse but I never heard of any.
Yes, I get that. I guess it's a very Christian idea, but I seem to have moved away from it. I don't like ranking people really, they are all valuable.
I get that too and it’s a good point. I’m feeling a bit “Animal Farm”ish I guess.
“All people are equal but some are more equal than others”.
It’s a ranking which is hard to avoid. But I should leave such rankings up to God.
I appreciate that distinction, and I'm glad we have Biblical Scholars weighing in regularly about what the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words are/were, as well as what they meant or most likely meant back then. I think it's a shame that these idiomatic passages are interwoven with passages to be taken (seemingly) at face value, which is how I infer you take the scriptures quoted in your third point. Deuteronomy 21 gives instruction re: when and how to have your rebellious son stoned to death. Idiomatic, yes? No?! Yikes.
I'd only muse that outlasting human sinfulness (if you mean that in the aggregate) is different than outlasting the sinfulness of any one human. That puts the scary right back into it. And of course, inference is everything.
Well, sadly, there's also Exodus 21:7-11 which details selling one's daughter into slavery among other revolting topics. I don't have to tell you that this passage was omitted from the RCL.
I guess I'd say that I think it's helpful to keep clear delineations. I think it's most helpful to consider the Bible as an anthology of mostly distinct books, and not one book. I also like to think that when subsequent authors cited only part Exodus 35:6, they were doing what some of us do now -- editing toward a more thoughtful, reasonable, palatable, useful text. That's a much friendlier consideration than subterfuge, which is, of course, a possibility.
Excellent. Let's do alma/virgin next, and see what we might untangle.
Appreciate you, @Nick Tamen!
I hope it’s okay if I don’t try to address everything you said, and instead focus on one thing that I think hits lots of points in my approach.
I don’t think I’d say that I necessarily take the passages quoted in my third point at face value, at least not per se. Rather, it’s more I say “These passages seem to be saying different things. What do we do with that?” For me, a major thing that means is that I have to remember
I’m reading writings not only translated from a different language but coming from a culture very different from our own with cultural assumptions very different from our own. And that means “face value” is a very tricky thing—what I see as “face value” may not be at all what an ancient Israelite saw as “face value.”
And that means I have to rely on scholars who can help me translate, both linguistically and culturally. And when it comes to the Hebrew Scriptures, for me it means I’m particularly interested in how Judaism, which has lived with these texts for millennia, understands them.
In that regard, I found this from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the “third and fourth generation” thing. He doesn’t bring up the idiom consideration, but he does square the various texts in a way similar to what I described.
I’ll add that I heard a word study on the commandment against killing recently, that argued that modern translations that render the Hebrew “you shall not murder” are not a good translation. The argument was that Hebrew had both words that mean “murder” and “kill,” and the word used in the commandment encompasses killing for any reason, even accidentally. The argument raised the question of whether punishments of death elsewhere in the Law were intended to be read in tension with the commandment not to kill. The point being considered was that the Law shouldn’t be read as a statute book. (Does calling the Torah “the Law” in English when the Hebrew meaning is more “Instruction” color how we English-speakers read it?). Rather, it was suggested, the Torah presents a variety of writings and perspectives intended to prompt consideration of what true justice is, and what the implications of taking a life for whatever reason are.
I’m still thinking through that and what I think of it.
I think that opens up a load of questions in terms of God's intention in creation and how that relates to the natural processes. Did God intend that particular insertion? Was he dependent on contingency? Did God actually create a block universe in which past and future are just different places, already set, between which we pass propelled by the laws of physics?
We're well past sickness being a result of the fall here. Without that viral infection we would not exist.